Introduction

During their history, the natural sciences have been invested with religious meaning, with antireligious implications and, in many contexts, with no religious significance at all. The object of this book is to offer some insight into the connections that have been made between statements about nature and statements about God. As we noted in the introduction, however, problems arise as soon as one enquires about the relationship between “science” and “religion” in the past. Not only have the boundaries between them shifted with time, but to abstract them from their historical contexts can lead to artificiality as well as anachronism.

How, for example, do we deal with that late nineteenth-century evolutionist Henry Drummond, who insisted that it was wrong to speak of reconciling Christianity with evolution since the two were one? In a glowing vision of The ascent of man (1894), Drummond acknowledged the Darwinian struggle for life, but he also referred to a struggle for the life of others. The former was essential to the evolutionary process, as individuals competed for resources. But, Drummond argued, so too was the latter: Once the human mind had evolved, self-sacrifice, cooperation, and maternal love would each contribute to the survival of societies in which those virtues were encouraged. Christianity and evolution were ultimately one because both denoted a method of creation; both had as their object the making of more perfect beings. Because altruistic love was germane to both, he could argue for a perfect union. Evolution embraced progress in spirit as well as in matter.

Introduction

The principal aim of this book has been to reveal something of the complexity of the relationship between science and religion as they have interacted in the past. Popular generalizations about that relationship, whether couched in terms of war or peace, simply do not stand up to serious investigation. There is no such thing as the relationship between science and religion. It is what different individuals and communities have made of it in a plethora of different contexts. Not only has the problematic interface between them shifted over time, but there is also a high degree of artificiality in abstracting the science and the religion of earlier centuries to see how they were related. As we saw in the opening chapters, part of what was meant by natural philosophy in the seventeenth century involved a discussion of God’s relationship to nature. Religious beliefs could operate within science, providing presupposition and sanction as well as regulating the discussion of method. They also informed attitudes toward new conceptions of nature, influencing the process of theory selection. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, despite vigorous attempts to separate scientific and religious discourse, the meaning attributed to scientific innovations continued to be reflected in the often conflicting social, religious, and political uses to which they were put. Part of the meaning of Darwin’s theory for T. H. Huxley lay in its potency as an antidote to what he saw as the poison of Roman Catholicism.

At first sight, this complicated story would seem to have reached a much simplified conclusion in the twentieth century. With the emergence of more pragmatic conceptions of truth, such as we have just observed in William James, it has been much easier to insist on the mutual irrelevance of scientific and religious discourse – each reflecting distinct practices and preoccupations. Scholars who have followed Wittgenstein in analyzing the functions of language have recognized the several levels on which it may operate: The world may be described in many different ways, without any one having to be reduced to another. On such a view it is possible, in principle, for science and religion to coexist without mutual interference.

The Challenge of Darwinism

Charles Darwin concluded his Origin of species (1859) with the proclamation that there was grandeur in his view of life. From a simple beginning, in which living powers had been “breathed into” a few forms or even one, the most beautiful and wonderful organisms had evolved. Because he used that Old Testament metaphor, and because he also referred to “laws impressed upon matter by the Creator,” it was possible to read into his conclusion a set of meanings and values associated with a biblical religion. His private correspondence suggests that this had not been his intention. He confided to the botanist J. D. Hooker that he had long regretted having truckled to public opinion by using the biblical term of creation, by which he had really meant “appeared by some wholly unknown process.” It was not that he had deliberately concealed an underlying atheism. Rather, in retrospect, he saw that he had invited the attribution of a particular meaning to his science with which he was uncomfortable – especially when writing to sterner naturalists than himself.

Darwin’s unease raises a point of general significance. Debates that have so often been interpreted in terms of the “conflict between science and religion” turn out, on closer inspection, to be debates in which rival claims are made for the “correct” meaning to be attached to scientific theories. Many of those who, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had constructed their distinctive accounts of the earth’s history felt themselves to be defending a particular set of social and religious values that they perceived to be under threat from the cosmologies of their opponents. During the period through which Darwin worked on his evolutionary theory there had, however, been signs of a shift in sensibility, with scientists themselves wishing to exclude cosmological debate from the practice of science. Charles Lyell, for example, had argued that geology would only become a science when it disentangled itself from biblical precepts, narrowed its scope to the reconstruction of the past in terms of forces known in the present, and deliberately excluded speculation about origins, purposes, and ultimate meanings. Darwin, too, came to share this view. There were questions that lay beyond the purview of current science. To admit them would be to reintroduce metaphysical and theological issues alien to the quest for positive scientific knowledge.